Steinbeck

There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to rise above those moments and behold the bigger picture in all of its complexity, complementarity, and temporal sweep, and to find in what we see not illusory consolation but the truest comfort there is: that of perspective. – John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s words were written, I understand, on January 1st,1941, during WWII–but they are applicable to world events now as well to each of our personal lives now. We have all known sorrow and sought consolation when there was little consolation to be found. Perspective does make a difference. Perspective can’t un-ring the bell, but it takes the mind beyond the immediate sorrow, takes it to a place where one’s own part in the scheme of things becomes more clear. In the final analysis there is little any one of us can do; and still that little is very much.

2016 was another wonderful year with terrible problems.

M L S Baisch

January 1, 2017

Happy New Year

Let 2017 be a year where we all, each one of us, bring light to the space we occupy on earth, laugh at the devils, and, like Michelangelo, may we all see the angel in whatever marble stone we find in front of us and carve until he is set free.

“This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted — slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. And I can do it. I feel very strong to do it.”